The saga of Omar from Baghdad

For those who, like Albert Brooks, have been looking for "comedy in the Islamic world," the search has been largely in vain, particularly as applIed to Islamist extremists.

Perhaps the cultural divide has seemed too wide to bridge with standard western set-up lines adapted to a jihadi context. Jokes like "Why did the Jihadi cross the road? To blow up the post office," seem to fall flat in their transliterated context. The punch lines are bombs. (Of course.)

It was enough to make one doubt the universality of humor. And if humor isn't universal, what hope have we for republican values? I mean, what is funny to people who burn cartoonists in effigy?

Walk into any hotel lobby in Peshawar and say, "Listen to this one. Two imams and a suicide bomber walk into an ak-bar." Try to get out alive. Some Muslims, at least their extremist elements, have had a 1,500-year humorectomy. Where is the hope for reconciliation?

Or so I thought, until last week. Last week we learned that the much ballyhooed killing of the notorious Iraqi al Qaeda leader Omar al Baghdadi never happened. Why? Because Omar al Baghdadi never existed. He was a creature of al Qaeda's imagination, and our and our Iraqi ally's gullibility.

He was played by an Iraqi actor named Abu Abdullah Naima, who was employed to read statements attributed to Baghdadi. By all accounts, moreover, he was one bad daddy, identified by U.S. and Iraqi intelligence as the successor to Abu Musab al Zarqawi, al Qaeda's point person in Iraq.

In March, the U.S. military and the Iraqi government announced that they had bagged Baghdadi. Days later, they admitted that they had captured someone else.

In May, the putative corpse of Baghdadi was displayed on state TV; the U.S. ultimately disputed that the dead man was Baghdadi, claiming a positive DNA match for someone else entirely. It was unclear whether the military had a DNA sample from the phantom Baghdadi. In the end, it was much Abu about nothing.

Last week, American officials acknowledged that they had been chasing a phantom, an insurgent prank. Baghdadi never existed. It seems those whacky insurgents sat around one day and said to themselves, "They'll never decapitate our leadership if our leadership doesn't exist," so they invented a leader.

One pictures them lying around sipping tea and eating dates, worn out from an afternoon of filming themselves climbing ropes and swinging from bar to bar on a jungle gym.

They try out different Iraqi-sounding names, coming up with the Iraqi equivalent of "Nathan from Detroit" or "Vinnie from Queens:" Omar from Baghdad. "That's it!" they cried and fired 2,000 rounds into the air to celebrate.

The success of the scheme speaks volumes - disturbing volumes - about the adequacy of our intelligence.

Six years after 9/11, and five years after our invasion of Iraq, we can be fooled by a prank like this? We have so little knowledge of who we are fighting that we don't even know if our enemies are real? Is Osama bin Laden embalmed like Charton Heston in El Cid, riding horseback in armor on the beach?

I prefer, however, to look on the bright side of Baghdadi. The Omar affair demonstrates beyond all skepticism that our enemies can take a joke - or, at any rate, deliver one.

In the long run, the presence of a sense of humor means that our enemies can be reached, if not with the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution then perhaps, playing to their apparent knack for slapstick, with thousands of air-dropped DVDs of the Three Stooges or Road Runner (featuring that most Islamist of cartoon martyrs, Wail al Coyote).

In the short run, I look forward to the next propaganda jest from the Prophet's Merry Pranksters. Once they stop laughing at Omar from Baghdad, what will they come up with next? I mean, after Omar, is the following news item all that far-fetched:
United States and Israeli officials announced today the death of revered Hezbollah lounge singer Abu Kaboom. Kaboom's remains were located in a smudge of asphalt on the streets of Tehran after a Predator strike.

Kaboom has become prominent in recent months as the crooner of "Hezballads," Dylanesque compositions that sound hauntingly like the western music Mr. Kaboom absorbed as a divinity student at Harvard but later rejected as decadent.

Until his recent hit "If I Had a Rocket," Mr. Kaboom's biggest sensation in the world of Hezbollah was his soulful "Me and My Mujahideen," sung in English-inflected Arabic to a tune that sounded eerily like Janis Joplin's "Me and Bobby McGee:"

Freedom's just another word

For no surviving Jews,

We'll fight them,
We'll push the Hebrews into the sea, inshallah,

Feeling good was easy, Allah,

When we strafed the Druze,

Oh feeling good was good enough for me, umma,

Good enough for me and my mujahideen.

The popularity of Kaboom's work alarmed many in the United States, and prompted an angry countersong from noted Israeli folk singer Shalom Shellack, with homage to Woody Guthrie's "This Land:"

As we went wand'ring

For years in pup tents

God gave to Moses

His Ten Commandments

God showed him desert

With nothing growing

God said "This land was made for only you."

This land is our land

It's only our land

It can't be your land

God gave it to us

There is no oil here

But we still want it

This land was made for only us.

Officials hope that the war of words will end with the detonation of Mr. Kaboom, although the latest release from his "Hezballads" collection, "If I Had a Rocket," is number 3 with a bullet (and they're not kidding) on the Al Jazeerah charts.

In the end, the affair of Omar from Baghdad can only leave us shaking our heads. Those crazy jihadis. What will they think of next?

The betting here is that, whatever they come up with, it won't be nearly as amusing. And that, whatever it is, we won't know what hit us.